Payment increases over the four-year term of the new contract will be between 2 and 3 percent - roughly the rate of inflation - about half of what Partners’ providers would have received during the last two years of the current contract.
“This suggests that this market, in terms of health care costs, has put the brakes on,’’ Gary L. Gottlieb, chief executive of Boston-based Partners, said in an interview.
Barbara Anthony, the state’s undersecretary of consumer affairs and business regulation, said the pact was the latest result of “the conversation begun by my boss,’’ Governor Deval Patrick, who sought to cap insurance premium increases in 2010, contending that they were crippling small businesses, families, and the state economy.
“This is evidence that the conversation is continuing among the people who can really reduce health care costs, the providers and insurers,’’ Anthony said. “For the sake of businesses and consumers, we’d like to see no increases. But this is good progress.’’
The agreement with Tufts, based in Watertown, covers payments to Partners’ doctors groups and hospitals, including Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals in Boston. It follows a similar agreement Partners reached last October with the state’s biggest health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
As with the Blue Cross deal, the new Tufts contract requires Partners medical care providers to accept so-called global payments. Those payments force doctors and hospitals to take on risk by giving them budgets for patient care rather than allowing them to bill insurers for individual patient visits, tests, and procedures.
The goal is to contain health care costs, which had been rising by double-digit percentages annually for much of the past decade. Combined with reduced payment increases under its new Blue Cross pact, Partners said, the deal with Tufts means the insurer’s overall payments will be $345 million less than they would have been otherwise over the next four years.
